Research Methods

There are several research methods that I’ve gone through last 8 weeks. Each of the methods has their own pros and cons.  Base on the theme my own opinion, I decided to use the four methods: formative research, target audience profile, iterative and interview. I feel that those are most useful and suitable for my final year project.

For the formative research, from the beginning of the project, I had to do a lot of research for my theme: reference, case study, formation, opinion form other, etc. I used to determine and refine the project planning process, update information to develop my project through out the entire process. The knowledge and information that I collect from formative research are very useful. From there I can have a strong base to build up my project and improve it during the developing process.

The second method is target audience profile. The reason why I chose this is because it’s important to define your target audience for your profile. Different ages they have difference thinking and feeling about the same problem. For example my theme for my graduation project is “Sex education for children”. My target audiences are kids from 4-10 years old and parents who have children in this group age. For “sex education”, kinder garden kids seem to be interested in what is pregnancy, how to protect yourself more than what is puberty and safe sex.

Next is iterative method. Through out the project I’ve consult with several lecturers about the project. From the beginning idea, way to develop the theme to illustration style, final outcomes. Listen to suggest and idea from different people help me to improve my project a lot. During the entire process I keep changing and developing my design after consulting with lectures.

Last but not least is interview. To understand more about how people think about my graduation project product, I’m planning to do some interview with my target audience. The interview is around the topic “Sex education for children”. What they think we should teach for children about how to protect themselves, whether the parents willing to teach their kids about that, what information I should put inside, ect.

Focus Group

Focus Group is one of effective research methods used to collect information and opinions from other people. It is a form of qualitative research in which group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. The number of people in a focus group is from 6 to 12, but the ideal number is 8 people. It can understand as and group interaction to collect data, self- experiences and find out why and how people think that way.

The method is conducted in an informal and natural way where respondents are free to give views from any aspect around the topic. The facilitator will prepare the questions following the topic and ask for people idea and suggestion about that. The advantage of the research method is that you can have rich information from lots of people at the same time. It can generate more critical comments as compared to having one-to-one interviews. Interaction between participants in focus group can be used to encourage research participants to generate and explore their own questions and develop their own analysis of common experiences.

Beside that focus group also have disadvantage like social disability effect- people shy to speak out if their opinion is different from others. During the discussion maybe there are some people disagree with other’s idea. If it turns into serious situation, the facilitator will need to calm them down. For some topic, if the target audience is children at young age, it’s also a challenge to conduct the discussion.

We did a focus group discussion last week. The facilitator is one of our friends and the topic is her FYP topic “Evolution of the Earth”. She opened the discussion by asking us after 500 years what would happen: technology, environment, society etc. We spoke out lots of our opinion and suggestion for her. But I noticed that there’s one our friends didn’t really say out anything. Because she said everything she was going to say, we all spoke out already :/ So we didn’t really get any of her sharing about the topic. It’s also one of the disadvantages of this research method.

Anyways, I still vote for this method because of the richness of information that I can gather during a short period of time. J

MOVIE REFLECTION “AVATAR”

There are three types of data collection methods in Field Studies. Intensive Interviewing, Group Interviewing and Observations.

1)   In Intensive Interviewing, the person giving the information is called an “informant”. Nam the “informant” in the movie and explain how he/she shares information with the researcher.

In the movie the Infomant is Neytiri because she is the one who teach Jake about the culture, language and people of Omaticaya. She helps Jake (researcher) to become one of the people of this tribe, closer the distance between normal human and tribe Omaticaya.

In Field Studies, there’re four types of researchers. Overt Participant Observer, Over Non- Participant Observer, Covert Participant Observer and Covert Non- Participant Observer

2)   The researchers in the movie are overt observers. Name the character that is a participant observer and the one that is a non- participant observer. Describe how both of them collect information.

In the movie, Dr. Grace Augustine is a non- participant observer and Jake Sully is a participant Observer.

For Dr. Grace, although she had her own avatar and she did a lot of research about Pandora and tribe Omaticaya but she didn’t really involve the activities in Pandora. She collected information by watching Jake and others people in the tribe did and noted it down.

For Jake, he really stepped inside tribe Omaticaya’s shoe. He learnt a lot of thing: how to create Tsaheylu to ride direhourse, how to use bow to hunt and how to be a part of the tribe. He learnt the culture and language of Omaticaya. And he did the video log to record all his information.

Field Study is a combination of emic and etic research.

3)   In the movie, describe the kind of information gathered that can be constituted as emic/etic data

Etic data is the data collected through existing theory. The information that Colonel Miles Quaritch gets is from Jake, Dr.Grace, Norm,… He watched the subjects of his study and he only had a surface understanding about Pandora and Omaticaya. In an easy way to understand etic data is the data you collect when you’re outside and looking in. What you can see and understand from your perspective is etic data.

Emic data, in the other side, is the data collected by real events that occurred and self- experience. The information that Jake’s collected is emic data. He really stepped in the Omaticaya society and tried to become one of them. The things that he learnt were from Neytiri- a girl from that tribe. The video he recorded was based on this real experience from Pandora. Therefor he had deeper understanding about the culture, language and the people of Omaticaya.